Capitalism and desire the psychic cost of free markets

As Marcuse puts it, “the individual lives his repression ‘freely’ as his own life: hedesires what he is supposed to desire; his gratifications are profitable to him and others; he is rea

CAPITALISM AND DESIRE

CAPITALISM AND DESIRE

The Psychic Cost of Free Markets

Todd McGowan

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Names: McGowan, Todd, author Title: Capitalism and desire: the psychic cost of free markets / Todd McGowan Description: New York: Columbia University Press, 2016 | Includes bibliographical references and index Identifiers: LCCN 2016005309| ISBN 9780231178723 (cloth: alk paper) | ISBN 9780231542210 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Capitalism—Psychological aspects | Capitalism—Social aspects | Psychoanalysis—Philosophy.

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For Bea Bookchin the only anticapitalist I’ve ever met

Acknowledgments

Introduction: After Injustice and Repression

[1] The Subject of Desire and the Subject of Capitalism

[2] The Psychic Constitution of Private Space

[3] Shielding Our Eyes from the Gaze

[4] The Persistence of Sacrifice After Its Obsolescence

[5] A God We Can Believe In

[6] A More Tolerable Infinity

[7] The Ends of Capitalism

[8] Exchanging Love for Romance

[9] Abundance and Scarcity

[10] The Market’s Fetishistic Sublime

Conclusion: Enjoy, Don’t Accumulate

Notes

Index

Chapters 2 and 3 contain work revised from earlier publications Thanks to AshgatePublishing for permission to reprint “Driven Into the Public: The Psychic Constitution of

Space,” in Architecture Post Mortem: The Diastolic Architecture of Decline, Dystopia, and

Death, eds Charles David Bertolini, Simone Brott, and Donald Kunze (London: Ashgate,

2013), 15–30 Thanks also to Wayne State University Press for permission to reprint “The

Capitalist Gaze,” Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture 35, no.

1: 3–23, copyright © 2013 Wayne State University Press

More than anyone else, Wendy Lochner at Columbia University Press was the enginefor the publication of this book She is an incredibly thoughtful and conscientious editor, andher efforts to sustain the publication of theoretical works today are unequalled

I also appreciate the work that Christine Dunbar at Columbia University Press did inorder to help this book to appear

Thanks to Dashiell and Theo Neroni for their constant insights into how capitalisminsinuates itself into the structure of our desire

The students at the University of Vermont played a decisive role in helping me to thinkthrough the psychic appeal of capitalism Ryan Engley has been especially influential on mythinking, especially concerning the theoretical underpinnings of the banal

My film studies colleagues at the University of Vermont—Deb Ellis, Dave Jenemann,Hilary Neroni, Sarah Nilsen, and Hyon Joo Yoo—have created a stimulating environment inwhich to teach and write

The Theory Reading Group—Joseph Acquisto, Bea Bookchin, Hilary Neroni, JohnWaldron, and Hyon Joo Yoo—have made the University of Vermont a place of respite fromthe demand for success

Quentin Martin has helped to direct my thinking about capitalism through his trenchantcritiques of it and has always been available to provide equally trenchant critiques of variouschapters

I appreciate Jean Wyatt’s careful readings of the first chapters of the book WithoutJean’s help, they would be twice as long and half as legible

Thanks to Danny Cho, Joan Copjec, Anna Kornbluh, Donald Kunze, Juan Pablo Luccheli,Hugh Manon, Jonathan Mulrooney, Ken Reinhard, Frances Restuccia, Rob Rushing, RussellSbriglia, Fabio Vighi, and Louis-Paul Willis, who have provided a theoretical milieu in which

no one is content but everyone is satisfied

Jennifer Friedlander and Henry Krips have continually nudged me to think in directionsthat I hadn’t foreseen, while at the same time giving me credit for the new turn

Thanks also to Slavoj Žižek for his obscenely generous help in finding the appropriateplace for this book to come out

I would like to also thank Richard Boothby, whom I encountered while in the middle ofthis project After that encounter, which I experienced as a miracle, everything was different

for me because there was someone else, cut from precisely the same cloth, who couldinterrupt my dogmatic slumbers.

Mari Ruti provided the most thorough and thoughtful reading that anyone has ever given

me The book took a great leap forward thanks to her contribution

Sheila Kunkle has supported this project in innumerable ways It would be unthinkablewithout her existence in the world, and she remains my fundamental co-conspirator

I owe the greatest debt to the three people who guide my thinking: Walter Davis, PaulEisenstein, and Hilary Neroni They are in the capitalist world but not of it

After Injustice and Repression

PSYCHOANALYSIS OF CAPITALISM

Can we psychoanalyze capitalism? Freud himself would probably have had his doubts

Toward the end of Civilization and Its Discontents, he questions whether or not one can

psychoanalyze an entire society and concludes that one cannot The problem is not apractical one Even though one cannot submit an entire society or an economic system to aseries of psychoanalytic sessions, every social order and every economic system speaksthrough articulations that betray its psychic resonances, and we can analyze thesearticulations from the perspective of psychoanalytic theory For Freud, the barrier topsychoanalyzing a society is a theoretical one The psychoanalyst can’t condemn an entiresociety as neurotic, for instance, because this diagnosis depends on a standard ofnormalcy with which to contrast the neurosis But the irony of this conclusion coming in abook that psychoanalyzes social order as such must have escaped Freud He is able toperform this act because no social order is complete and perfectly self-identical Ratherthan being self-contained and thus impervious to critical analysis, every society opens up aspace outside itself from which one can analyze it and make a judgment on it The sameholds for capitalism as a socioeconomic structure The space for the psychoanalysis ofcapitalism exists within the incompletion of the capitalist system

If we accept the verdict that we cannot psychoanalyze capitalism as a socioeconomicsystem, then we implicitly accede to the arguments of the apologists for capitalism.Defenders of the system claim that capitalism is a function of human nature—that there is aperfect overlap between capitalism and human nature—and thus that there exists no spacefrom which one might criticize it From this perspective, any foundational critique isinherently fanciful and utopian But much more than other socioeconomic systems,capitalism necessarily relies on its incompleteness and on its opening to the outside in order

to function One can psychoanalyze capitalism though the very gaps the system itselfproduces and through its reliance on what exceeds it It is the case, however, that thepractice of psychoanalysis has not always been equal to this task

Many critics of capitalism associate psychoanalysis with capitalism It functions,according to this critique, as one of capitalism’s ideological handmaidens It has the effect

of shoring up potential dissidents and transforming rebellious subjects into more quiescentones This tendentious understanding of psychoanalysis is not wholly unjustified In itspractice (especially in regions of the world most fervently committed to capitalism, like theUnited States), psychoanalysis has certainly played a role in enhancing the docility of itspatients rather than unleashing their revolutionary passion But the verdict on psychoanalyticpractice is decidedly mixed Psychoanalytic theory has played a key role in the critique ofthe capitalist system, though it has never played the decisive role

Most of the attempts to understand how capitalism works have focused on its economicstructure or on the social effects that it produces While important, these approachesnecessarily miss the primary source of capitalism’s staying power The resilience ofcapitalism as an economic or social form derives from its relationship to the psyche and tohow subjects relate to their own satisfaction This is why psychoanalysis is requisite formaking sense of capitalism’s appeal Psychoanalysis probes the satisfaction of subjectsand tries to understand why this satisfaction takes the forms that it does It does nottransform dissatisfaction into satisfaction, but analyzes why certain structures providesatisfaction despite appearances In this sense, it represents a new way of approachingcapitalism and of understanding its staying power.

To psychoanalyze a system is inherently to criticize it But previous efforts at marshalingpsychoanalysis for the critique of capitalism have consistently placed psychoanalysis in asecondary position Critique has been primary, and critics have deployed psychoanalysis toserve the critique In the chapters that follow, I will do the reverse: the psychoanalysis ofcapitalism will remain the motor for the analysis, and if a critique of capitalism emergesfrom this psychoanalysis, it will never become the driving force of the analysis Of course,

no one is a neutral analyst of capitalism But it is my contention that immersing oneselfwithin its structure and within its psychic appeal must function as the prelude to anyeffective critique or defense of the system

THE INJUSTICE OF EQUALITY

When the critique of capitalism began in earnest in the nineteenth century, the focus was onthe injustice of the system Capitalism may have unleashed society’s productive forces to ahitherto unforeseeable extent, but this expansion of productivity brought with it vastdifferences in wealth It was a system in which the material benefits did not enrich thosewho directly made them possible The mere investment of capital received an almostinfinitely greater reward than the hours of toil that produced this reward The setup itselfappeared unjust and gave rise to a range of possible remedies for this injustice—fromradically egalitarian communal retreats to the total transformation of the society

But as defenders of capitalism have noted, the mere fact of this critique is itself atestament to the justice of the system It is only after the introduction of the capitalisteconomy that one can recognize the injustice perpetuated by unequal relations In thissense, capitalism has only itself to blame for the critiques leveled against it The idea ofequivalence inheres within capitalist relations of production: any commodity can be tradedfor any other, and even time, the one resource that we cannot replenish or replace,acquires a price and thereby becomes a factor of equivalence The worker trades labortime for wages and thereby makes clear that time relates to the general commodity formjust like any other commodity The fact that everything can be made equal reveals thateverything isn’t, and this makes possible the critical response

Prior to the capitalist epoch, inequality inheres in economic systems themselves, not intheir failure to realize the equality that they already promulgate (as is the case withcapitalism) In a society where slaves perform the labor, there is no sense of even a

disguised equality between the laborer and the master who benefits from this labor Thesame inequality continues in feudalism, where the feudal lord offers serfs livelihood inexchange for their labor The inegalitarian nature of this exchange is admitted from thebeginning The lord holds all the cards, and the serfs can only try to make themselves usefulfor the lord In any system involving masters and servants or citizens and slaves, revolt ispossible—Spartacus, for instance, is not unthinkable—but its chances of success arelimited because it challenges not just the system’s structural arrangement but also itsphilosophical basis To grant freedom to Spartacus would amount to an admission ofequality that would have undermined the entire Roman world.

With capitalism, the economic relation ceases to be inherently unjust, which is why theblatant persistence of injustice gives rise to critical voices only after the birth of capitalism.The idea that the greatest philosopher of his time, like Aristotle, would not only countenancebut justify slavery becomes impossible to imagine within the capitalist epoch.1 Even thoughthe critique of injustice is most often a critique of capitalism, it is to capitalism itself that weowe the emergence of this critique It is not by chance that Karl Marx educated himself byreading the first theorists and defenders of capitalism They help to make possible thecritique of the system they set out to justify Though capitalism doesn’t invent the concept ofequality, it is the first economic system to include this concept within its mechanism ofproduction

From the beginning to the end of his analysis, Marx takes the injustice of the capitalist

system as his point of departure In the early Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, he

laments the impossible bind that confronts the worker, for whom no amount of labor will payoff He writes, “The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces, the morehis production increases in power and size The worker becomes an ever cheapercommodity the more commodities he creates.”2 The system is rigged against the worker: itrewards the capitalist, not the worker, for the extra productivity that the latter achieves Thetheorization of this injustice becomes the foundation of Marx’s fully developed analysis ofcapitalism

In his mature work, Marx specifies more clearly the site of the injustice—theappropriation of surplus value The exchange between the capitalist and the worker is equal

as far as it goes The capitalist provides a wage in exchange for the worker’s labor time.But the injustice comes from the creative power of labor itself In the act of laboring,workers don’t just produce enough to sustain themselves but rather an excess, and thecapitalist capitalizes on this excess in the form of surplus value, which translates into profit.Without the excessive productivity of labor that falls outside the realm of an equal exchange,the capitalist would be left without any profit As Marx comes to recognize, profit is theft.That is the acme of the egalitarian critique of capitalism, and this critique predominates intothe beginning of the twentieth century

According to this critique, capitalism is an unjust economic system because it deprivesthose who produce value of the value they produce It reduces the working class—that is,the productive class—to bare reproduction Workers receive a necessary wage, a wagenecessary for their reproduction as productive laborers, not a wage necessary for theenjoyment of life Marx believes that the capitalist will not pay workers more than this

necessary wage, and thus they cannot enjoy the surplus value that they themselvesproduce This excess belongs instead to the capitalist, who organizes production butdoesn’t herself or himself generate value A system such as this cannot be just.

From the standpoint of this egalitarian critique, capitalism works out well for thecapitalists and poorly for the workers The incentive to change it rests wholly with theworkers, whose interests are dramatically opposed to those of the capitalists Marx neverthinks to address his critique to the capitalists because they find the system, as he sees it,perfectly satisfying Though they are on the wrong side of history, they want to preservecapitalist relations of production intact and fight to keep them so In the twentieth century,however, this understanding of the capitalist undergoes a radical transformation as thefundamental critique of capitalism shifts to a new territory

THE REPRESSIVE ECONOMIC APPARATUS

It is difficult to overestimate Freud’s impact on the critique of capitalism But mobilizing histhought for emancipatory politics meant finding the possibility for hope amid the bleakestdespair As Michel Onfray rightly notes in his scathing account of Freud, he created “aviscerally pessimistic philosophy in virtue of which the worst is always certain.”3 DespiteFreud’s conviction that the worst is certain, that we will never be able to overcomerepression and realize our desires, his understanding of repression allowed for thedevelopment of the leftist critique of capitalism in a wholly unanticipated direction Noanticapitalist thinker of the nineteenth century thought to criticize the repressive nature ofthe capitalist system, but in the twentieth century, thanks to Freud and the critics who took

up his mantle, it became almost impossible to avoid it.4

The critique of capitalism for most of the twentieth century was a critique of capitalism’srepressiveness, though of course the critique of inequality never disappeared The turn fromequality as the primary ground of contestation to repression resulted in an expansion of thechallenge to the system Capitalism became a problem not just for workers toiling withoutjust remuneration for their labor but also for the exploiters themselves Even the capitalistenjoying the profits deriving from the appropriation of surplus value remains caught withinthe spell of repression The factory owners who can buy whatever they want nonethelesssuffer under a system that prohibits any proper satisfaction of desire The problem withcapitalist success is not so much the inequality it produces as its intractable emptiness Thisdevelopment of the critique required the revolution to do more heavy lifting: it would promisenot only equity but also deliverance from repression

The turn from the critique of inequality to the critique of repression manifests itself mostclearly in the case of the Frankfurt School Whereas Marx takes capitalist inequality as thefundamental problem confronting the critic of capitalism, the Frankfurt School, in a stunningturnaround, sees the equality that capitalism produces as its chief danger Rather thanfailing to engender equality, the capitalist form of injustice is a forced equality Capitalism’srepressiveness functions through the elimination of all genuine difference, and thus even thecommunist attack on capitalism falls into its trap by leveling all difference through enforcedeconomic and social equality

The Frankfurt School’s critique of capitalist equality reaches its apex in Theodor

Adorno’s Minima Moralia Here Adorno offers a revelatory statement that incorporates both

an unremitting indictment of capitalism’s elimination of difference and one of his few positiveproclamations about an anticapitalist alternative He begins, “That all men are alike isexactly what society would like to hear It considers actual or imagined differences asstigmas indicating that not enough has yet been done; that something has still been leftoutside its machinery, not quite determined by its totality.”5 As Adorno sees it, capitalism’svictory does not consist in leaving the proletariat outside, but in their inclusion within arepressive system in which nothing unique or singular can persist This is a line of thoughtthat one could not imagine from Karl Marx, even though Adorno clearly situates himself inthe Marxist tradition, as do the other members of the Frankfurt School But their Marxismhas encountered the thought of Sigmund Freud

Adorno goes on to offer a vision of emancipation that also veers away from that ofMarx It is not a society in which the workers appropriate the value that they themselvesproduce but one in which singularity could remain intact Adorno continues, “An emancipatedsociety, on the other hand, would not be a unitary state, but the realization of universality inthe reconciliation of differences.”6 This idea of emancipated society takes as its startingpoint as much Freud’s analysis of repression as Marx’s of capitalism Repression,according to the Frankfurt School, is the forgetting of what fails to fit within the capitalistsystem, and the critical task becomes one of drawing attention to this repressed material.This repression is not, however, always sexual repression, as it would be for other theoristsattempting to bring Marx and Freud together

Several anticapitalist theorists following in Freud’s wake equated the destruction ofcapitalism with the complete elimination of sexual repression They either worked to bringabout sexual liberation with the belief that this would portend the end of capitalism, or theyworked to combat capitalism with the belief that this would free repressed sexuality OttoGross and Wilhelm Reich were the key exponents of this position, but it gained popularsupport in the student movements of the 1960s, in which the idea that political and sexualrevolution were intertwined became an accepted dogma Both Gross and Reich believedthat political and sexual revolution would be mutually reinforcing If one produced sexualrevolution, that would lead to political revolution, and vice versa Hence, they often theorizedabout how changes in either the political or sexual arena might lead to the elimination ofrepression in both

One can see this intertwining of the political and the sexual in much of Gross’s late work.The title of his essay “Zur funktionellen Geistesbildung des Revolutionärs” (On theFunctional Intellectual Formation of the Revolutionary) makes evident his politicalaspirations There the link between these aspirations and his investment in psychoanalysiscomes to the fore Toward the end of the essay, he says, “As a precondition of each moraland spiritual renewal of humanity is the necessity for a total freeing of the cominggeneration from the violence of the bourgeois family—and even the patriarchal proletarianfamily is bourgeois!”7 Contra Freud, Gross sees neurosis as the result not of thefundamental antagonisms of human sexuality but of the repressive force of the bourgeoisfamily and the restrictions that it places on the free expression of sexuality Gross

conceives of free sexuality—the slogan of the 1960s—as the basic human desire Theproletarian revolution would not only free workers from their chains but also sexuality frombourgeois repression.8

In the years after Gross’s premature death at the age of forty-two in 1920, WilhelmReich took up the mantle of the revolutionary psychoanalyst Like Gross, Reich linksneurosis to social repressiveness, and, also like Gross, he believes that political revolution

is inextricable from sexual revolution His attack on the repressiveness of capitalist society

finds its most cogent expression in The Sexual Revolution, a work that attacks bourgeois

marriage and restrictions on forms of abnormal sexuality.9 Whereas Gross largely fadedinto history, Reich became a theoretical point of reference for the countercultural revolution

of the 1960s.10 The relative success of the sexual revolution and the failure of the politicalrevolution had the effect of quieting the dream that we might overcome repressioncompletely There are few followers of Reich today

For the most part, critics of capitalism accepted Freud’s contention that no society could

do without some degree of repressiveness But they added a codicil to this contention thatrenders it less politically stultifying The prevailing idea among leftist critics of capitalism hasbeen that the system demands too much repression If every society requires some

repression in order to function, capitalism requires what Herbert Marcuse in Eros and

Civilization calls “surplus repression.” Whereas Marx targets surplus value as the

embodiment of the problem with capitalism, Marcuse places surplus repression in this role.This turn tells us everything we need to know about the transformation of the critique ofcapitalism Now, we can demand a socialist alternative on the grounds of this additionalrepression in capitalism that a socialist society would eliminate The problem isn’t theinequality involved with the appropriation of surplus value, but the unnecessary demand forsurplus repression that creates a society of one-dimensional equals.11

Even when capitalist society seems to allow for the fulfillment of desire, the repressiveregime continues to function Happiness under capitalism is not an index of a break fromrepression As Marcuse puts it, “the individual lives his repression ‘freely’ as his own life: hedesires what he is supposed to desire; his gratifications are profitable to him and others; he

is reasonably and often exuberantly happy.”12 As long as desire remains within the channelsthat capitalism provides for it, there is no possibility for satisfaction, just a false happinessthat serves as the form of appearance for profound dissatisfaction Desire directed towardcommodities is inherently repressed desire Satisfaction requires breaking from the logic ofthe commodity altogether, and this becomes the hope for revolution

Once the idea of repression enters into the critique of capitalism, the idea of revolutionitself undergoes a complete revolution Marx invests revolution with the promise of equality:

it would create a world in which everyone had access to the fruits of her or his own laborand in which no one would be excluded After Freud, however, equality is no longer enough;revolution must do more A communist revolution would free desire from the trap ofrepression There would be equality, but there would also be an elimination of the surplusrepression the exchange economy demands This does not necessarily imply completesexual liberation, as Gross and Reich would contend Instead, the revolution wouldinaugurate a society where sublimation took the place of repression or where repression

was no longer omnipresent.13 This image of revolution depends on the identification of thecapitalist economy with a form of repression that goes beyond what is necessary Butperhaps it is time to revisit this longstanding identification and question whether the essence

of capitalism lies in its repressiveness

Of course, the putting into question of the link between capitalism and repression has

already been accomplished In the first volume of the History of Sexuality and in some of

his lecture series at the Collège de France, Michel Foucault challenges the repressivehypothesis and even names Reich as a specific target for critique He begins the first

volume of his History of Sexuality with a direct riposte to the identification of capitalism with

repression He claims, “By placing the advent of the age of repression in the seventeenthcentury, after hundreds of years of open spaces and free expression, one adjusts it tocoincide with the development of capitalism: it becomes an integral part of the bourgeoisorder.”14 For Foucault, power in the capitalist system doesn’t function through repression,not through negation or prohibition, but in a positive way Power produces desire ratherthan just restricting it Foucault’s redefinition of power and categorical rejection of therepressive hypothesis attempt to point toward a third version of the critique of capitalism—beyond injustice and beyond repression

But even as Foucault mocks the association of capitalism with the repression of sex, hiscritique takes the same angle as that of the Freudian Marxists from whom he distanceshimself That is to say, Foucault abandons the idea that capitalism demands the repression

of desire, but he clings to a belief that capitalism blocks or damns up what would otherwiseflow freely His vitalism—his insistence on the spontaneous power of life itself—leaves himincapable of fully abandoning the image of capitalism as a system of constraint Thoughcapitalism doesn’t constrain desire, its discursive regime of sexuality that forces sex tospeak and that forces bodies to become sexualized acts as a barrier to the flow of bodiesand pleasures Foucault’s politics consists in unleashing this flow, which is why he would

feel so comfortable writing a preface to Anti-Oedipus, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s

panegyric to decoded bodily flows

Ironic though it may be, the critique leveled by Foucault is just another version of theattack on repression Despite what Foucault himself says, the model for the freeing of

bodies and pleasures—the ethic he pronounces at the end of the first volume of the History

of Sexuality—is the liberation of desire that one finds clearly articulated in the thought of

Gross and Reich Bodies and pleasures do not suffer from repression, according toFoucault, but power does stifle them This is the key point: power doesn’t permit the freemovement of bodies and deprives them of the pleasure that they are capable ofexperiencing Critique or revolution then fights against this restriction Though Foucault

rejects the terms repression and desire, his replacements—power and bodies—perform

precisely the same roles In this sense, he does not mark a new epoch in the history of thecritique of capitalism

Foucault’s diagnosis of what transpires with capitalism clearly differs from the traditionalFreudian Marxists, but his response is homologous He is a Freudian Marxist—he is OttoGross—in disguise Life must be disentangled from power in order to discover the pleasurethat capitalism blocks Despite his vehement disdain for the counterproductivity of the

repressive hypothesis, Foucault remains within the vision of emancipation proffered by itschampions.

FINDING SATISFACTION UNSATISFYING

Both Marx’s critique of capitalism’s injustice and the pseudo-Freudian critique of capitalism’srepressiveness focus on what the economic system denies to its adherents rather thanwhat it provides for them This focus unites Marx, Reich, and Foucault It has been primarilythe apologists for capitalism, as one might expect, who have focused on what the systemdoes offer But we can examine what capitalism provides from the perspective of critique.Capitalism has the effect of sustaining subjects in a constant state of desire As subjects ofcapitalism, we are constantly on the edge of having our desire realized, but never reach thepoint of realization This has the effect of producing a satisfaction that we don’t recognize

as such That is, capitalist subjects experience satisfaction itself as dissatisfying, whichenables them to simultaneously enjoy themselves and believe wholeheartedly that a morecomplete satisfaction exists just around the corner, embodied in the newest commodity

In this light, this book represents a third direction in the critique of capitalism Ratherthan taking inequality or repression as the starting point, it begins with the satisfaction thatcapitalism provides The problem, I contend, is not that capitalism fails to satisfy but that itdoesn’t enable its subjects to recognize where their own satisfaction lies The capitalistregime produces subjects who cling feverishly to the image of their own dissatisfaction and

to thus to the promise, constantly made explicit in capitalist society, of a way to escape thisdissatisfaction through either the accumulation of capital or the acquisition of thecommodity

The fundamental gesture of capitalism is the promise, and the promise functions as thebasis for capitalist ideology One invests money with the promise of future returns; onestarts a job with the promise of a higher salary; one takes a cruise with the promise ofuntold pleasure in the tropics; one buys the newest piece of electronics with the promise ofeasier access to what one wants In every case the future embodies a type of satisfactionforeclosed to the present and dependent on one’s investment in the capitalist system Thepromise ensures a sense of dissatisfaction with the present in relation to the future

One of the constant complaints from critics of capitalism is that the capitalist system hasthe ability to incorporate every attack by integrating the attack into the system Theaccuracy of this truism is readily apparent in the way that commodification works.Capitalism seizes apparently revolutionary practices or figures and transforms them intocommodities An acquaintance with a Che Guevara T-shirt or a Karl Marx coffee mug, letalone the sight of sex toys in a shopping mall or eco-friendly cars at the neighborhooddealership, seems to bespeak its truth But the secret of capitalism’s integration of critiquelies not in the process of commodification, no matter how self-evident it appears Thesecret is in the promise If one invests oneself in the promise of the future, through thisgesture one accepts the basic rules of the capitalist game

The promise of the better future is the foundation of the capitalist structure, the basis forall three economic areas—production, distribution, and consumption If we examine only the

field of consumption, universal commodification seems to hold the key, whereas if weconfine ourselves to the field of production, the imperative to accumulate appearsfoundational In the field of distribution, it is the idea of speed: one must move commodities

to market in the least amount of time possible If we look at what these three fields have incommon, however, the answer is the promise of the future One buys the commodity todiscover a potentially satisfying pleasure, one accumulates more capital to some day haveenough, and one speeds up the distribution process to increase one’s future profit.15 Anysense of satisfaction with one’s present condition would have a paralyzing effect on each ofthese regions of the capitalist economy

This is the problem with the insistence on revolutionary hope: it partakes of the logic that

it tries to contest Revolutionary hope represents an investment in the structure of thepromise that defines capitalism As a result, it is never as revolutionary as it believes itself

to be Though obviously the act of promising precedes the onset of a capitalist economy,once this economy emerges, the promise enters completely into the capitalist logic To takesolace in the promise of tomorrow is to accept the sense of dissatisfaction that capitalismsells more vehemently than it sells any commodity As long as one remains invested in thepromise as such, one has already succumbed to the fundamental logic of capitalism

From the early Charles Fourier and Robert Owen to Fredric Jameson and AntonioNegri, the idea of a better future has driven the Left in its critique of capitalism In hisdiscussion of Marx, Jacques Derrida exemplifies this type of investment, as he emphasizesthe emancipatory promise at the heart of his deconstructive politics He notes, “Whether thepromise promises this or that, whether it be fulfilled or not, or whether it be unfulfillable,there is necessarily some promise and therefore some historicity as future-to-come.”16

While every other concept is subject to deconstruction, this promise of “justice-to-come”functions as the condition of possibility for deconstruction and thus cannot bedeconstructed Deconstruction does not encapsulate the entirety of anticapitalist politicstoday in any sense, but Derrida’s investment in the promise is representative But it is justthis investment in the promise that must be abandoned, along with the sense ofdissatisfaction inherent in it As long as radical politics operates with the belief thatrevolution will remove some of the prevailing repression, it accepts the ruling idea ofcapitalism and buys into the fundamental capitalist fantasy No revolution can transformdissatisfaction into satisfaction, but this is how revolution has been conceived throughout theentirety of the capitalist epoch The revolutionary act has to be thought differently Therevolutionary act is simply the recognition that capitalism already produces the satisfactionthat it promises

And yet, this revolutionary act is far more difficult than storming the Bastille or the WinterPalace In the latter instances, all that is required is sufficient political force But the breakfrom the promise of a better future seems theoretically untenable alongside a position ofcritique Critique appears to imply a future ideal from which one launches the attack on thecapitalist present The task is thus that of freeing critique from the promise of a betterfuture Why would one be critical at all without such a promise? What could be the possibleground for the critique?

This work attempts to answer these questions by situating the future not as a possibility

on the horizon but as the implicit structure of the present There is, in other words, no future

to realize except to accede to the exigencies that are already written into the rulingcapitalist system The point of critique is not promissory, not futural, but wholly immanent

Obviously, a critique that is not futural still points toward a future that is better in somesense of the term One cannot avoid implicitly positing some version of a better future whenone analyzes the present—otherwise one would simply accept the present rather thananalyzing it But the point is that one must not imagine a future that would produce a level ofsatisfaction history has hitherto denied to us There is no deeper or more authenticsatisfaction that will overcome the antagonisms of society or the failures of subjectivity,despite what anticapitalist revolutionaries have traditionally promised We do not need thebelief in a future replete with a deeper satisfaction in order to reject capitalism, if that iswhat we decide to do

The alternative to capitalism inheres within capitalism, and the revolutionary act is one ofrecognizing capitalism’s internal and present future The measuring stick for critique is notthe promise of a better future but capitalism’s underlying structure The identification orrecognition of this structure provides the key to the emergence of an alternative.Capitalism’s hold over us depends on our failure to recognize the nature of its power

Capitalism functions as effectively as it does because it provides satisfaction for itssubjects while at the same time hiding the awareness of this satisfaction from them If werecognized that we obtained satisfaction from the failure to obtain the perfect commodityrather than from a wholly successful purchase, we would be freed from the psychic appeal

of capitalism That is not to say that we would never buy another commodity, but just that

we would do so without a psychic investment in the promise of the commodity, which isalready, in some sense, a revolution This change would eliminate the barrier to structuralchanges to our socioeconomic system and would create a different system Problems ofpolitical organization and struggle are difficult, but they pale in comparison to the problem ofcapitalism’s psychic appeal Understanding the importance of the psychic investment in thecapitalist economy and the need to break from it is Freud’s legacy for the contemporarycritique of capitalism

The great task for twentieth-century critical thought was that of bringing Marx and Freudtogether, of thinking through the analysis of capitalism in light of Freud’s discovery of theunconscious In order to carry out this task, thinkers alit on the role that capitalism played inrepression But repression was not Freud’s last word on the unconscious It becameincreasingly less important as his thought changed toward the end of his life This change inthe significance of repression occurred as the structure of Freud’s system underwent anoverhaul Whereas the early Freud associated repression with unacceptable sexual desires,the later Freud linked it the subject’s intractable attachment to loss

With Freud’s 1920 discovery of the subject’s tendency to repeat loss and failure, theedifice of psychoanalysis underwent a profound readjustment Rather than targeting sexualrepression, Freud turned his focus to the satisfaction that the subject derives from repeatingexperiences that don’t provide pleasure This forces Freud to distinguish between pleasureand satisfaction, and he concludes that satisfaction trumps pleasure Repetition comes todefine subjectivity for Freud: the unconscious doesn’t just hide disturbing sexual ideas from

the subject’s consciousness, but impels the subject to act in ways that subvert its owninterests, and the subject finds satisfaction in these acts because they produce a lost objectfor the subject to desire and enjoy The subject’s satisfaction is inextricable from self-destructive loss, and even though it represses its self-destructiveness, lifting this repressionwould provide no relief After 1920, Freud discovers a subject that incessantly underminesitself, and this undermining extends to all attempts at a cure.

As Freud sees it, the fundamental proof of an attachment to loss and failure is therefusal to be cured that patients display Freud labels this refusal the “negative therapeuticreaction,” and its emergence suggests that subjects find satisfaction in their suffering Iftherapy threatens to relieve this suffering, patients often respond by finding ways to makethemselves worse again Freud doesn’t dismiss this behavior as a function of neurosis butsees in it a verdict on the subject as such It manifests itself most clearly in the inability ofany subject to live out a harmonious existence Freud concludes that the satisfaction ofsubjects depends on a disturbance to their psychic equilibrium, on the absence of what theydesire rather than its presence The presence of an object reveals its inadequacy, while itsabsence allows the subject to find it satisfying This creates a world in which subjectssubvert their own happiness in order to sustain their satisfaction

Freud himself has difficulty formulating the implications of the new theory of subjectivityand integrating it into his existing theory, and yet it represents the most radical moment ofFreud’s thought because it enables us to understand why subjects so often fail to act inways that would obviously benefit them That said, many refused to follow Freud in thisdiscovery, and those who tried to combine Marx and Freud often adhered to the earlyFreud, the Freud of repressed sexuality This makes sense for the revolutionary: Freud’searly model provides a clearer target for emancipatory politics than his later model, whichseems difficult to reconcile with any form of politics other than complete conservatism Thelater Freud is a far more politically pessimistic thinker

According to the first model, we repress a possibility that we hope to realize According

to the second, we repress an act that we are perpetually accomplishing Though Freud

locates at all times the source of neurotic illness in the past—“Hysterics suffer mainly from

reminiscences,” as Freud and Josef Breuer put it in the opening work of psychoanalysis—

the emphasis moves from a past desire for a different future to the repetition of a pasttrauma in the present.17 Freud emphasizes repression less in his later thinking because itprovides no barrier at all to the effectiveness of repetition

In a certain sense, we might think of the early Freud, the Freud focused on sexualrepression, as a thinker still invested in the capitalist ideology of the promise Even if herefused to believe in the possibility of fully overcoming repression, he nonetheless viewedpsychoanalysis as a solution that promised a better future The shift that the patient could

undergo is palpable After writing Beyond the Pleasure Principle, however, Freud

recognizes that the repetition would act as a constant barrier to a better future, and hebecomes increasingly skeptical about fundamental change in individuals and in society Theattitude that Freud takes to the subject’s repetition becomes less futural because thepossibility of overcoming repression ceased to play a central role

The repression of sexual desires appears to work: though subjects may manifest these

desires through obsessional rituals or hysterical pains, they are not actually having the illicitsex of their unconscious fantasies Repeatedly adjusting one’s batting gloves (as manybaseball players do) may in fact be a wholly sexual act, but not everyone will readilyrecognize it as such One can do it in public without violating laws against public indecency,whereas one could not openly masturbate in the same situation without risking arrest.Similarly, no one interprets the silence of the hysteric who cannot speak as a publicperformance of fellatio Repressed sexuality manifests itself in symptoms—like adjustingone’s batting gloves—that don’t themselves appear sexual Repression not only bringssuffering to the subject but also shelters this subject from the obvious manifestations of itsrepressed sexuality This is not the case with the compulsion to repeat Though Freudbelieves that the subject represses the idea of its repetition, the satisfaction that therepetition of loss produces occurs without abatement or obstruction.

Repression becomes a less important category in Freud’s later thought because hecomes to accept that the repression provides no barrier at all to the satisfaction the subjectderives from repetition As long as repression concerned just sexuality, Freud could believe

in the transformative effect of lifting it Psychoanalysis, according to this early conception,might enable the patient to pass from dissatisfaction to satisfaction by uncovering therepressed This offers a tidy link between psychoanalysis and revolutionary politics,between Otto Gross and Rosa Luxemburg

Once the idea of a satisfying repetition takes hold, however, this image ofpsychoanalysis ceases to be tenable There is no clear political gain from lifting therepression associated with repetition All that psychoanalysis can do—the extent of itsintervention—is to assist the patient in recognizing its mode of repeating and the satisfactionthat this repetition provides The dream of freeing patients from dissatisfaction dies with thediscovery that patients resist the psychoanalytic cure precisely because they already havethe satisfaction that psychoanalysis promises them

The thinkers who have brought Freud to bear on the analysis of capitalism have turned

to psychoanalysis to prove that capitalism is even more dissatisfying than earlier criticsthought it was The problem is not just inequality for the working class but repression for all.For someone like Adorno, this is apparent in the widespread investment in astrology amongcapitalist subjects While it appears as a harmless enough interest, astrology infects thesocial order, especially the middle class (and not necessarily the economically oppressed),with a false satisfaction In his essay “The Stars Down to Earth,” Adorno notes, “It is asthough astrology has to provide gratifications to aggressive urges on the level of theimaginary, but is not allowed to interfere too obviously with the ‘normal’ functioning of theindividual in reality.”18 The popularity of astrology columns in newspapers, even if one readsthem just for fun, signals the existence and repression of desires that the system cannotgratify The victims of capitalism in Adorno’s eyes are not just the working class buteveryone subjected to the repressiveness inherent in the mode of subjectivity that capitalismdemands

This broadening of the analysis of capitalism has led to stunning insights into just howexpansive the problem of capitalism is, but at the same time, this new critique buys thecapitalist dream with its insistence on dissatisfaction It could do this only insofar as it stuck

to Freud’s early theory of the psyche and refused to integrate his later thought This laterFreud has had no place in the critique of capitalism as it was developed by traditionalFreudian Marxism in the twentiethth century As a result, the task of bringing Marx andFreud together remains for us today If the real Freud is the Freud of the subject’s self-destructiveness, then this is no easy task The fit between this Freud and Marx is not acomfortable one.

The aim of this book is not to provide another catalogue of capitalism’s horrors or itsdefects That is the province of other works Instead, it tries to understand why so muchsatisfaction accompanies capitalism and thus what constitutes its hold on those living withinits structure The starting point of this power is capitalism’s relationship to desiringsubjectivity, which the first chapter investigates The next chapters that make up the core ofthe book explore how capitalism protects us—from the encounter with the public, from ourgaze, from sacrifice, from the absence of guarantees, from infinitude, from ournonproductivity, from love, and even from abundance But it does enable us to experiencethe sublime in everyday life, as the concluding chapter shows The book ends withcapitalism’s sublimity, but this is also where it starts The staying power of capitalism, itsresistance to critique, is inextricable from its production of sublimity, which gives it thepower to satisfy Capitalist subjects cling tightly to their dissatisfaction, and thisdissatisfaction is the main thing holding them to capitalism No matter how attractive itappears, there is no commodity that holds the appeal of a lasting dissatisfaction

[ 1 ] The Subject of Desire and the Subject of Capitalism

MOSES AND THE PROPHETS

The difficulties that capitalism engenders begin with its definition The problem stems fromthe incredible historical and spatial breadth of the capitalism system This system rangesfrom the burgeoning markets of early European modernity to the unbridled laissez-fairesocieties of nineteenth-century Britain and the United States to the authoritarian society ofthe formerly communist China of the early twenty-first century As both proponents andcritics acknowledge, capitalism has a remarkable elasticity that appears to defy any strictpronunciations concerning its essence It is almost impossible to identify the points at whichcapitalism begins and where it ends

For most defenders of the capitalist economy, its capacity for the inclusion of difference

is its crowning virtue In fact, capitalism is such a variable system that we cannot speak of asingle system There is not one capitalist system, but many capitalist systems.1 According

to capitalism’s critics, this variability distinguishes capitalism from all other economicsystems and highlights its nefariousness As Guy Debord sees it, the commodity formdeveloped within capitalism colonizes every other social form, and this process reaches itsendpoint in what he calls the society of spectacle He claims that “the spectaclecorresponds to the historical moment at which the commodity completes its colonization ofsocial life It is not just that the relationship to commodities is now plain to see—

commodities are now all that there is to see; the world that we see is the world of the

commodity.”2 The spectacle is not qualitatively different than earlier forms of capitalism:capitalism doesn’t just accommodate differences, but violently integrates them into a logicthat eliminates them But the key lies in understanding what this logic is

Both adherents and opponents of the capitalist system agree that it places the law ofthe market—buying and selling what people themselves choose to buy and sell—at thecenter of the social organization Even if the state intervenes in the market by injectingmoney, stabilizing prices, or supporting certain industries, the system remains capitalist,according to most theorists, as long as the free market plays the determinative role In acapitalist economy, the state can play a supportive role and can even act as a brake onuntrammeled capitalist development, but the market must ultimately have the last word Thisdefinition is compelling and accurate as far as it goes, but it fails to capture capitalism’sspecific relationship to the psyche of those invested in it It is on the psychic level that onediscovers how capitalism functions

To understand the psychic benefits that capitalism metes out, it is important todistinguish it from culture Though capitalism includes within itself vast cultural differences, it

is not itself a culture, and thus one should never speak of the culture of capitalism From the

perspective of capitalism itself, it is a matter of indifference which culture germinated it andwhich culture nourishes it If Europe receives the credit or the blame for capitalism’semergence, this is a matter of pure historical contingency when one considers howcapitalism works It is not a Eurocentric phenomenon, but a universal one that remainsfundamentally the same even when it transforms itself to include cultural differences.

Capitalism transcends culture and offers its subjects psychic rewards that are radicallydifferent from those that cultures provide As a member of a culture, I gain a stablesymbolic identity associated with a structure that extends beyond my own subjectivity Thisstability is the primary weapon with which culture lures its adherents, and it contrastsentirely with the weapons that capitalism employs Culture gives the subject a sense ofbelonging that capitalism does not

The capitalist subject constantly experiences its failure to belong, which is why therecurring fantasy within capitalism is that of attaining some degree of authentic belonging (in

a romantic relationship, in a group of friends, in the nation, and so on) Though capitalismspawns this type of fantasy, it constantly militates against the fantasy’s realization.Capitalism offers the promise of belonging with every commodity and with the commodity

as such, but the subject can never buy the perfect commodity, or enough of them, to unlockthe secret of belonging Unlike the subject of a particular culture, the capitalist subject doesnot have a place that offers a sense of identity There is only a lack of place that spawnsthe search for place through the process of constant enrichment, a process that serves only

to augment the subject’s lack of place and identity The only identity the capitalist subjecthas lies in its absence of any identity

The essence of capitalism is accumulation The capitalist subject is a subject who neverhas enough and continually seeks more and more But this project of endless accumulation

is built, ironically, on the idea of its end Capitalist accumulation envisions obtaining theobject that would provide the ultimate satisfaction for the desiring subject, the object thatwould quench the subject’s desire and allow it to put an end to the relentless yearning toaccumulate In this sense, an image of the end of capitalism is implicit in its structure, andthe key to capitalism’s staying power lies in the fact that this ultimately satisfying objectdoesn’t exist Capitalism commands accumulation as an end that the subject can neverreach, and this command holds in all aspects of the capitalist system—production,distribution, and consumption The producer must produce more in order to earn moremoney, the distributor must distribute more in order to maximize profit, and the consumermust consume more in order to find the truly satisfying object In each case, the failure toaccumulate enough is inscribed in the system and is the source of the satisfaction that thesystem offers

There is thus a radical difference between the image capitalism presents to its subjectsand the real satisfaction they find in it The capitalist system requires that subjects investthemselves in the idea of accumulation and the promise of an ultimate satisfaction thataccompanies the idea There is no capitalist subject—and thus no capitalist system—without this idea With all the variety that we find in the capitalist universe, the one constant

is a commandment to accumulate that operates in the psyche of every capitalist subject.Any struggle against the capitalist system must begin with the psychic investment in the

promise of accumulation that it necessitates This investment is much more difficult to avoidthan any financial investment because it infects even those who believe that they have optedout of the system and live off the grid The psychic reach of capitalism far outstrips itssocioeconomic reach.

Capitalism commands accumulation and promises a satisfaction that it cannot deliver.This failure has its origins in the structure of the subject’s psyche and the way that thesubject finds satisfaction The psyche satisfies itself through the failure to realize its desire,and capitalism allows the subject to perpetuate this failure, all the while believing in the ideathat it pursues success The link between capitalism and the psyche provides the key tounderstanding the appeal of capitalism It is a system that enables us to envision thepossibility of a satisfaction that is structurally unattainable for us while, at the same time, itallows the real traumatic source of our satisfaction to remain unconscious This doubledeception creates a system with an inordinate staying power, a system that appears to bewritten into our genetic makeup

THE DIVISION OF THE OBJECT

Despite appearances, capitalism is not the result of human nature The system’s apologistswho insist on this point do so in order to sustain an aura of inevitability around it Butnonetheless, beyond the bare socioeconomic agenda of its proponents, we can understandwhy this association arises Associating capitalism with human nature is an ideologicalgesture, but the feeling that capitalism fits our mode of desiring is not wholly ideological.Capitalism’s emergence and its psychic appeal are related to the nature of humansubjectivity, though this subjectivity is itself unnatural, a function not of natural processes but

of a disjunction from the natural world Capitalism succeeds as it does by playing into thealienation from nature that occurs through signification Though the development ofcapitalism was not necessary—one can imagine a world in which it didn’t emerge—one cannonetheless understand its rise and staying power in terms of the structure of the psyche.3

We are, one might say, psychically disposed to invest ourselves in the capitalist system.Capitalism succeeds because it capitalizes on our status as unnatural beings

If humans were simply instinctual animals, capitalism would neither develop nor take apsychic hold on us It is not just by accident that there is no capitalist system flourishing inthe animal world In this sense, the claim of a link between capitalism and human natureshould be rejected out of hand Capitalism’s appeal is inextricable from the emergence ofthe signifier and the transformation that this emergence effects on speaking beings Thepassion that subjects exhibit for capitalism derives from the break from nature that occurswhen subjects begin to speak Through this break, natural human needs undergo acomplete transformation and become susceptible to the allure of accumulation and of thecommodity that capitalism will bring to the fore We aren’t capitalists because we areanimalistic but because we are fundamentally removed from our animality The commoditydoes not fulfill a natural need but a desire distorted by the signifier, a desire that emergesthrough the signifier’s distortion of animality There are thus no prototypical capitaliststructures in the animal world It is language that gives birth to the possibility of this

economic form The exploration of capitalism must first and foremost be an exploration ofwhat occurs with the introduction of the signifier.

Signification makes capitalism possible because it alienates the individual from itsenvironment by introducing a layer of mediation into all of the individual’s interactions.4

Rather than simply feeling hunger and eating the nearest apple in the manner of a humananimal, the subject will seek a satisfaction that transcends the apple through the apple Forthe subject of the signifier, unlike for the human animal, an apple is never enough Once theworld of signification exists, the apple’s noncoincidence with itself becomes apparent, andthe empirical apple ceases to prove satisfying As an object of need, the apple is just anapple and can satisfy the need But after the introduction of the signifier, the apple’s self-division enables it to signify something beyond itself A supplement attaches itself to theapple in the form of the signifier, and this excess remains irreducible to the object Thesubject in the world of signification can never just eat an apple but eats instead what “keepsthe doctor away,” what is juicy and delicious, or what connotes original sin The apple willembody something more as a result of the division introduced by signification, and thisexcess attached to the apple produces a satisfaction for the subject that an apple by itself

—an apple that isn’t an “apple”—can never provide for an animal that eats it.5

We tend to miss the apple’s self-division not just because apples, before they are eaten,appear to be whole but primarily because the signifier carries with it the illusion oftransparency In fact, signifiers hide their opacity through the guise of transparency Thesignifier seems simply to provide an identity for an object that already exists withoutchanging that object: there are objects hanging on trees, and someone decides to assignthe name “apples” to them Signifiers don’t appear to alter what they signify, and, as aresult, we don’t recognize the mediation that shapes our world The world appears as animmediate set of elements laid out for us to perceive as we will But the signifier isnonetheless opaque This means that it distorts what we perceive and changes theelements with which it interacts

The signifier causes us to see “apples” rather than apples Every object takes on thehue given to it by the system of signification and loses its image of self-identity The object

of need becomes an object of desire.6 The distorting power of the signifier does not occur

in addition to our perception—like a pair of colored glasses that we might wear—but rather

is our perception We perceive through and as a result of the distortion Grasping theeffects of this distortion looms as a key problem in modern thought, and it also offers aninitial key to understanding capitalism’s appeal to us as subjects of the signifier

Because the subject confronts divided objects, it can never obtain an object that wouldenable it to realize its desire No object is whole or fulfilling for the subject Though it can’tmake objects whole, capitalism transforms the image of objects As commodities, objectsappear whole and present opportunities for the subject to achieve fulfillment Capitalismdoesn’t eliminate the division in the world reflected in signification, but it does present thisdivision as a contingent rather than as a necessary obstacle It maps itself onto signification

in order to hide signification’s inherently traumatic structure

The signifier produces a divided world Ferdinand de Saussure famously describes thedivide as one between the signifier and the signified, though other linguists have used

different terminology What is instructive is that the signifier introduces the conception of asplit, so that the world of appearance becomes simply apparent and not all that there is.7

This split creates the possibility of sense If we relate to an undivided reality, nothing canhave any signification whatsoever Objects do not constitute a significant whole that awaits

us to discover its sense As Saussure notes, we don’t begin with significations that awaitsignifiers to pin them down He claims instead, “Without language, thought is a vague,uncharted nebula There are no pre-existing ideas, and nothing is distinct before theappearance of language.”8 Language creates a significant world to which we can relate, but

it also makes evident the division of this world from itself The signifier is not identical withthe signified Isolated instances that suggest an equivalence, such as onomatopoeia, arenot primary but rather secondary attempts to bridge a fundamental chasm.9

The division between the signifier and signified indicates the presence of absence withinthe world There is a gap between the word and what it signifies, between the name andthe idea of the object or action, and no amount of precision can ever fill this lacuna.Capitalism, in contrast to signification, relies on the belief that the proper commodity willeliminate this absence and produce an enduring presence But this presence never actuallycomes about within the capitalist economy Capitalism presents itself as structureddifferently than signification, but it leads to the same failures that arrive with the signifier

We produce or consume additional commodities in order to realize our desiredefinitively, but we never achieve this realization In the same way, we use other signifiers

to define a signifier, but they can never do so authoritatively There is always more to saybecause the search for the signified is unending, just like the process of production andconsumption is unending One meaning always leads to another, and one commodityalways leads to another This is evident in the case of signification but hidden in that ofcapitalism

The signifier indicates a signified that is not present and that will never become present.Every attempt to discover the signified—through, say, looking a word up in the dictionary—will only lead to other signifiers that will attempt to approximate it No dictionary in existencecould provide direct access to the signified because the signified is nothing but the absence

of the subsequent signifier that would define the first Sense, which seems to reside on theside of the signified, actually remains on the side of the signifier insofar as we must usesignifiers to define signifiers and explain what we mean There is thus no end to the searchfor sense and a blank space where we expect an answer The perfect commodity, incontrast, promises an end to the search

When the subject encounters the world of signification, it encounters an intractableabsence It always seeks something and yet finds nothing The initial signifier points toanother that would complete it but never does The world of signification promises ananswer it never delivers, and this is how it installs an absence at the heart of the desiringsubject There is no ultimate resolution for the subject’s desire, just as there is no ultimateresolution to signification itself Once the signifier emerges, absence inhabits every moment

of subjectivity and establishes the structure of desire.10

This constant confrontation with absence orients the subject around loss As a humananimal, the instinctual being can discover objects that will fulfill its needs The satisfaction

that comes from obtaining an object is always a possibility, though never a certainty, for thisbeing A lion can feel hungry and find satisfaction in eating a gazelle But for the subject ofthe signifier, no such object exists There are no satisfying gazelles on the subject’s table,even for meat eaters No object is identical to itself, and the subject cannot find the objectthat would provide satisfaction because this object transcends the subject’s field of possibleexperience The distance that separates the signifier from the signified also separates thesubject from the satisfying object.

With the onset of capitalism, the speaking being enters a system that promises relieffrom the absence that inheres within the basic structure of signification Other systems haveintegrated loss into social life in various ways—through ritual sacrifice, through ceremoniesthat consume great resources, and so on But capitalism represents an epochal change.Loss becomes contingent rather than necessary, and the commodity provides an answer tothis traumatic contingency

LOSING WHAT WAS ALREADY GONE

The status of the object within capitalism changes along with the subject’s relationship toloss Just as loss comes to seem contingent in the capitalist epoch, the lost object thathaunts all speaking beings ceases to be constitutively lost Jacques Lacan identifies the lost

object (which he calls the objet a) as what orients the subject’s desire even though the

subject has never had it But in capitalism the lost object acquires a substantial status itdoesn’t actually have It appears as something substantial that the subject has lost through

a traumatic event insofar as it appears accessible in the form of the commodity

Though absence must inhere within being itself, signification redoubles this absence andinstalls it at the center of the signifying system Thus, to exist within signification is to acceptloss as constitutive, a situation that psychoanalysis calls lack Signification retroactivelycreates a lost object that was lost with the entrance into signification and that would haveprovided complete satisfaction if it had actually existed Even though this object has nosubstantial status and can never acquire any concrete form, it shapes the contours ofsubjectivity All of the subject’s multifarious activity within the world of signification centersaround the attempt to rediscover this object that it never possessed

One of the fundamental errors of psychoanalysis consists in granting the lost object asubstantial status.11 This is often visible in object relations psychoanalysis, whichunderstands the subject as first and foremost relational rather than traversed by loss Thisform of psychoanalysis makes the same error that capitalism does concerning the object

At first glance, a relational understanding of subjectivity makes tremendous sense: it seemsimpossible to understand subjects in isolation from each other or the development ofsexuality apart from other subjects And yet, this form of psychoanalysis ironicallyrepresents a flight from Freud’s own understanding of the power of mediation oversubjectivity That is to say, it constructs a myth of an original relation to the objectunaffected by the travails of mediation Even if the subject suffers from encounters with badobjects, these objects remain fully present for the subject in object relations theory and thuslack the constitutive absence that all objects have for the subject of the signifier

This error becomes evident in the theorizing of even the most sophisticated objectrelations psychoanalysts such as W R D Fairbairn Fairbairn imagines a direct experience

of the object from the period of infancy In “Object Relationships and Dynamic Structure,”

he describes the infant’s relation to objects as one in which the object itself might providesatisfaction without loss or mediation He writes, “The real libidinal aim is the establishment

of satisfactory relationships with objects; and it is, accordingly, the object that constitutesthe true libidinal goal At the same time, the form assumed by the libidinal approach isdetermined by the nature of the object Thus it is owing to the nature of the breast that theinfant’s inherent incorporative tendency assumes the form of sucking with the mouth.”12

Here the infant aims at an attainable satisfaction embodied in the object, and nothing barsaccess to this object Though the adult might lose this original relationship with the object, itdoes exist, for Fairbairn, prior to its loss

Object relations psychoanalysis and its many derivations do attempt to account for thepower that loss has over the subject But they do not conceive of loss as constitutive, which

is why their conception of the object parallels that of capitalism Loss, for someone likeFairbairn, is an empirical rather than an ontological fact There is an immediacy of presenceprior to the mediation of absence Loss may very well occur in every case, but it is alwaysthe loss of something The breast is a paradise lost, whereas for Freud paradise exists—tothe extent that it does—only in the act of losing Paradise lost is the speculative equivalent

to paradise regained That is to say, loss doesn’t represent a disruption of the subject’sinitial satisfaction but the emergence of the possibility for satisfaction To regard loss as theloss of something is to fail to recognize loss as constitutive of subjectivity But this is aconception of loss that escapes object relations psychoanalysis in the same way that itescapes the capitalist subject.13

When he writes Beyond the Pleasure Principle in 1920, Freud begins to define the

subject through its constitutive loss From this point on in his thinking, he conceives of thesubject as completely determined by loss, as driven toward its own destruction—a processthat he misleadingly labels “death drive.” Though there are hints of this breakthrough inearlier works, the radicality of the 1920 revolution should not be understated In fact, evenFreud himself did not fully grasp its radicality, as evidenced by his failed attempt to reducethe subject’s repetition of failure and loss to a tendency to return to an inorganic state.Death drive connotes a desire to die, which is why it leads readers of Freud (and evenFreud himself) astray What he is really onto with this concept is that the subject findssatisfaction in repeating loss, that the subject’s satisfaction is inextricable from failure

No one sets out consciously to fail, and, even if one did, the act of making failure a goalwould immediately transform it into a different form of success Within consciousness thesubject cannot give failure primacy Consciousness is oriented around projects in which thesubject aims at succeeding, and the failures of these projects, from the perspective ofconsciousness, are only contingent failures the subject can attempt to remedy by tryingagain or trying harder Unconsciously, however, the subject depends on failure to satisfyitself Failure and loss produce the object as absent, and it is only the absence of the objectthat renders it satisfying Absence animates the subject, driving it to act, in a way thatpresence cannot If we think about who marches in the street, it is those who lack, not

those who have, and when those who have do march, it is because the threat of lossmanifests itself Even though they march for the elimination of this lack, it is absence thatmotivates them to march in the first place It is also absence or the threat of it that enables

us to get out of bed in the morning and go to work The subject that had no absence in itsexistence would be unable to act and would lack the impetus even to kill itself After seeingnumerous patients display their attachment to absence and loss, Freud concludes that itholds the key to the subject’s form of satisfaction

We can see this play out in sports fandom Though we consciously root for our favoriteteam to win, we find more unconscious satisfaction in the persistent struggles of the sportsteam that we root for than in its unqualified successes The close game is infinitely moreinteresting than the blowout because it enables the fan to experience loss while not havingloss enter into consciousness No one wants to root for a team that wins all its games, and

if fans flock to the games of teams that win all the time, they go to see the loss (or potentialloss) that will disrupt the winning, just like auto racing fans go to see cars crashing (orpotentially crashing), though this desire remains unconscious Even when our favorite teamwins a championship, we begin almost immediately to consider how they might fare the nextyear This is a way of leaving the terrain of success for that of potential failure When weachieve the pinnacle of success, we seek out a way to return loss into our existence byimagining a new challenge or embarking on a new project

Loss injects value into the subject’s existence and gives it an object that providessatisfaction Freud’s conception of the priority of loss and its repetition troubles otherpsychoanalysts (like Fairbairn, for instance) because it highlights the impossibility of anysatisfaction associated with obtaining the object After this point, for Freud, one simplycannot have the satisfying object Any notion of success becomes unthinkable, and onemust reconceive satisfaction in terms of how one fails Failure becomes the only option

On the basis of privileging failure, Freud reimagines the object in a way that challengesboth much of the history of philosophy and the psychic demands of capitalism The object isnot an object that the subject hopes to obtain but a limit that the subject encounters Thesubject cannot overcome the limit but constitutes itself and its satisfaction through the limit.That is to say, the object that thwarts the subject’s efforts at obtaining it retroactivelycreates the subject around the recalcitrance The subject seeks out what it cannot obtainand latches itself onto these objects Its failure with regard to them provides a satisfactionthat completely defies the capitalist image of reality

Freud’s conception of the object enables us to rethink the famous slogan from May 1968

in France The mantra of this movement—jouir sans entraves (enjoy without hindrances)—

expresses the critique of capitalism’s repressiveness, the critique that dominated much ofthe twentieth century The problem with this slogan is that eliminating the barriers to

enjoyment would eliminate the source of enjoyment By slightly changing it to jouir les

entraves (enjoy the hindrances), we capture the constitutive importance of the obstacle.

Satisfaction exists in the obstacle that the object erects in the face of the subject’s efforts

to obtain it rather than in the eradication of all obstacles But this is what the capitalistimperative to accumulate enables us to avoid confronting

The speaking subject satisfies itself through its process of failing to obtain its object,

even if this goes unrecognized by the subject itself The relationship between subjectivityand loss leads the subject to flee this recognition and find asylum in the framework ofcapitalist accumulation The subject repeats a constitutive loss because loss is the only waythat the speaking subject has to relate to objects, even though capitalism provides theimage of an alternative The signifier confronts the subject with an absence that formssubjectivity and that the subject can never overcome But the loss that haunts the subjectalso constitutes the subject, which is why it seeks to repeat this loss.

The signifier creates the subject through the act of removing what is most essential forthe subject, even though this essential object doesn’t exist prior to its removal From thispoint on, the subject will remain unable to divorce satisfaction from loss One might say thatthrough the signifier the subject loses the object into existence Loss generates the object

at the same time that it marks its disappearance, which has a determinative effect on howthe subject satisfies itself The subject may find fleeting pleasure in success andachievement, but its only satisfaction will take the form of the repetition of loss Subjectsundermine themselves and self-sabotage not because they are stubborn or stupid butbecause this is their path to satisfaction For the speaking subject, winning is only a detour

on the way to losing.14 Even the winners in the world of the signifier are ultimately on theside of defeat, but just take a longer time to get there than others

When we understand the difference between instinctual beings and speaking subjects,the appeal of thinking about ourselves in terms of instinct rather than subjectivity becomesself-evident Instinctual beings have the capacity to overcome loss and obtain satisfactionthrough the object they seek Instinctual beings can become winners that suffer onlycontingent failures rather than remaining ensconced in perpetual failure Instinct holds within

it the promise of a satisfaction untainted by loss, a full satiation that, even if it soondisappears, can often be replicated The being envisions a goal that would providesatisfaction and then either attains the goal or not Success may be difficult and may notendure, but it’s not impossible

But the subject attains satisfaction through the repetition of its inability to obtain itsobject Failure is the subject’s mode of success Lacan describes this in one of his most

lucid explanations of the structure of subjectivity In Seminar XI, he separates the subject’s

goal from its aim and uses a metaphor to explain the aim He claims, “When you entrust

someone with a mission, the aim is not what he brings back, but the itinerary he must take The aim is the way taken.”15 The satisfaction of the subject derives from the path that ittakes But what Lacan fails to add here is that this path necessarily involves an encounterwith loss: rather than seeking out its object, the subject finds ways to miss it and to ensurethat it remains lost The lost object is constitutively lost, and the satisfaction that it offersdepends on it remaining so The subject has no hope that it might attain its lost object,which is why psychoanalysis must refrain from describing the infant’s satisfying relationshipwith the mother’s breast prohibited by the father It is only in retrospect (or from theperspective of an observer) that this relationship appears perfectly satisfying

Freud first conceives of the appeal of loss in response to his observation of destructive actions that appear to violate the pleasure principle It is the penchant for self-sabotage and self-destruction that leads Freud to speculate about the existence of a death

self-drive that aims at a return to an inorganic state But we don’t have to indulge in this type ofhypothesis if we recognize the constitutive role that loss plays in the subject’s satisfaction.Without the lost object, the subject would lose what animates it and the source of itsenjoyment The act of self-sabotage, even though it detracts from the subject’s pleasure,

enables the subject to continue to satisfy itself In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud

theorizes that the negative therapeutic reaction that subverts the psychoanalytic cure is notjust the product of resistances The subject does not want to be cured because itassociates healing with the loss of its foundational loss, a prospect much more horrifyingthat the pain of the neurosis With the recognition of the constitutive role of loss in thepsychic economy, psychoanalysis must alter its conception of the cure Rather than simplyending repression or even overcoming loss, the cure has to involve changing the subject’srelation to its lost object, experiencing the intimate connection between loss andsatisfaction

THE ALLURE OF BUYING A BUNCH OF THINGS

Every subject of the signifier endures loss This is the primary fact of subjectivity But thetragic nature of subjectivity leads the subject to misrecognize how it obtains satisfaction.The subject’s devotion to loss remains necessarily unconscious as it consciously strives towin Though the subject attains its satisfaction from the absence of the object, itnonetheless consciously associates satisfaction with the object’s presence For this reason,the subject fails to recognize its own satisfaction and believes itself dissatisfied, but thisdissatisfaction feeds on hope for a future success Though the disappointments pile up, thesubject who fantasizes about ultimately obtaining its object continues to look toward thenext object as potentially being the one The subject can keep up its hopefulness only byforgetting the series of disappointments that its previous acquisitions of the object haveproduced

The subject moves from object to object in order to avoid confronting the fact that itmisses the same lost object again and again The perpetual movement of desire obscuresits rootedness in missing the object rather than obtaining it The subject fails to see that theobject is satisfying as an object and not as a possible possession When the subject investsitself in the fantasy of obtaining the object, it avoids the monotony of the subject’s form ofsatisfaction One has dissatisfaction, but one also has a variety of objects that one desireswith the promise of a future satisfaction This future satisfaction never comes, and obtainingobjects brings with it an inevitable disappointment One thought that one was obtaining theimpossible lost object, but one ends up with just an ordinary empirical object that pales incomparison I believed that the piece of chocolate cake that I just ate embodied the lostobject itself before I ate it, but after having done so I realize its underwhelming ordinariness.Perhaps it is because cinema enthusiasts recognize how the film almost perfectly laysout the relationship between the lost object and its inadequate replacements that most

acknowledge Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941) as the greatest film of all time.16 After anexterior traveling shot of the gate to his mansion, the film begins with Charles Foster Kane

(Orson Welles) uttering his dying word, “Rosebud.” This word occasions an investigation bynewspaper reporter Jerry Thompson (William Alland) in which the story of Kane’s life,related by those who knew him, is told through a series of flashbacks Thompson begins

with the idea that the object signified by Rosebud will reveal the truth of Kane’s desire,

though after failing to find this object he concludes that no such object could possibly exist.The final shot of the film, however, belies his concluding remarks by showing Kane’s

childhood sled with the name Rosebud adorning it.

The point is not, as one might expect, that Kane would find fulfillment if he obtained thelost sled representing his abbreviated childhood and the attachment to his mother, but thatthe sled embodies loss itself As such, it animates Kane’s entire existence He is a subjectinsofar as he has endured a constitutive loss But he consciously seeks out, as the filmshows in the interval between the utterance of “Rosebud” and the revelation of the object, aseries of expensive objects that cease to provide satisfaction the moment Kane obtainsthem The sled metaphorizes loss: it substitutes for what is not there, representing loss assuch In contrast, the objects that Kane collects—statues, paintings, exotic animals, and soon—reveal the metonymy of Kane’s desire He moves from object to object in search of onethat might satisfy him, but none does.17

While Kane is caught up in the logic of success, he actually follows the path of the failure

—and this is true of all seeming winners in the world His continual failure to find a satisfyingobject through striving for success produces the unconscious satisfaction of failure Kanesatisfies himself unconsciously through the serial quest for a missing satisfaction Though heseeks success, he perpetuates failure, and the repetition of failure is the logic ofsubjectivity While Kane enacts this process, the spectator undergoes the same dynamic.The film presents a series of flashbacks that promise to reveal the ultimate truth of Kane,but each time the film comes to the end of a flashback, the mystery remains Thespectator’s satisfaction in viewing the film doesn’t derive from the final revelation but fromthe repetition of the failed revelations that the final revelation of the lost object punctuates

As a result, the spectator can recognize where to locate her or his satisfaction in a way thatKane cannot.18

The final revelation of the truth of the signifier Rosebud does not represent a realization

of desire for the spectator but a confrontation with the fundamental nothingness of the lostobject This is why the disappointed reaction, “It’s just a sled,” is entirely appropriate Thesled reveals that, even when there really is an object to be rediscovered, the objectembodies nothing and thus cannot offer the ultimate satisfaction Desire avoids this

encounter with the nothingness of the lost object by turning to accumulation, and Citizen

Kane makes the failure of this path evident The relative failure at the box office of the film

on its highly anticipated release suggests that audiences wanted to cling to the logic ofaccumulation rather than confront its inevitable failure

The fact that Citizen Kane associates the turn away from the failure of subjectivity with

Kane’s acquisition of wealth is not coincidental Capitalist accumulation and consumption,which proceed through the refusal of constitutive loss, operate with the hope of ultimatelyobtaining the object One continues to accumulate more capital and more objects, but noamount of accumulation can bring satisfaction Kane reveals this through the complete

indifference that he displays toward the objects he has purchased Welles also demandsthat we as spectators share in this indifference At the end of the film, we see workerssimply throwing many of these objects into a fire The failure of accumulation—and thefantasy that motivates it—becomes fully explicit But, paradoxically, it is this failure, notfuture success, that provides the only possible satisfaction No matter what tack the subjecttakes, it cannot help but feed the repetitive failure it endeavors to escape.

Nonetheless, failing to grasp the necessity of failure distorts the subject’s relation to theOther (the figure or figures of social authority) The subject that fails to grasp the necessity

of loss looks for the secret key to the object in the Other The Other appears to knowsomething that the subject itself does not For the subject caught up in the logic of success,the Other is captivating because it appears to escape the loss that damages the subjectitself The subject invested in success remains dissatisfied because it fails to register theconstitutive nature of loss and seeks satisfaction in an object that the Other desires

The capitalist subject constantly wonders which object is the most desirable or the mostdesired by other subjects For instance, a subject buys a car hoping to find just the rightmodel and color to speak to what other subjects desire The subject will search for—andnever find—the car that perfectly embodies what Jacques Lacan calls the desire of theOther This is the desire that the subject associates with the other or others that the subjectitself desires (and supposes to know the secret of desire) We desire what we assume theOther desires because the Other desires it and because we want to attract the desire ofthe Other It is in these two senses that our desire is always the desire of the Other

The mystery of the desire of the Other lures the subject through its irreducibility tosignification The desire of the Other escapes the signifier—it is what can’t be said—but itappears to be attainable through a hermeneutic effort If we study what the Other wants, itseems as if we could divine the desire that the signifier obscures But this is a loser’s game:there is no substantial Other whose desire we might interpret Like the subject itself, theOther is divided from its own desire and looks elsewhere to find out what it wants Thedesire of the Other appears as a puzzle that one might solve, but this is its great lure Thefantasy of obtaining the object that the Other desires works to convince the subject that itcan find satisfying objects But the crucial insight of psychoanalysis is that the subject’ssatisfaction is located in how it desires and not what it obtains With this insight, it provides

an important clue for understanding how capitalism works

BARRIERS WITHOUT BOUNDARIES

The genius of capitalism consists in the way that it manipulates the relationship between thesubject and its own satisfaction Capitalism enables subjects to avoid the trauma of theirself-destructive satisfaction and to immerse themselves in the promise of the future Itblinds us to the necessity of loss and immerses us in the logic of success, even thoughsuccess is nothing but a path on the way to loss The structures of capitalist production andconsumption demand that the subjects involved in them think in terms of success rather thanfailure, or else these structures would cease to function The fantasy of successfullyobtaining the lost object is essential to the perpetuation of capitalism

Capitalists must believe that they can acquire the lost object through their investment inthe capitalist system This is most evident in the case of the consumption of the commodity:consumers purchase each new commodity with the hope that this object will be the objectthat will provide the ultimate satisfaction But they inevitably find, after some initial pleasure,only more dissatisfaction, which inspires them to purchase another new commodity holdingthe same illusory promise Many people buy new cars not so much because the old one nolonger works but because they hope to find a satisfaction in the new one that the old onefailed to provide If the old commodity did provide this satisfaction, capitalism would notfunction, and consumers would not feel obliged to seek out new commodities that theydidn’t need What Marx calls capitalism’s production of needs treats consumers as subjectsthat believe in the possibility of the truly satisfying object.19 Capitalism leads the consumerfrom one commodity to the next according to the metonymy of desire.

The problem is that the closer the subject comes to the object, the more the objectloses what makes it desirable and becomes just an image that cannot provide the promisedsatisfaction There is a strict opposition between the image of the object and some otherdimension of the object—the object as a remainder that doesn’t fit within the world ofrepresentation and that renders it desirable Proximity has a deleterious effect on both thesubject’s desire and the object’s desirability

The same problem infects capitalist production as well Capitalists want to increase theproductivity of the production process in order to realize greater and greater profits, butincreased productivity has the effect of lowering the rate of profit In short, the very effort tomaximize profit becomes a barrier to profit Marx notices this irony in his perspicaciousanalysis of capitalism’s contradictory processes He says, “The profit rate does not fallbecause labour becomes less productive but rather because it becomes more productive.The rise in the rate of surplus-value and the fall in the rate of profit are similarly particularforms that express the growing productivity of labour in capitalist terms.”20 Marx’s point hereholds whether one accepts the theory of surplus value or not Capitalists constantly work toincrease the productivity of labor in a particular industry, but this increased productivityleads to a lesser rate of profit More efficient labor enables capitalists to sell for less, andthis damages the amount of profit that the capitalist produces The effort to generate agreater rate of profit within the capitalist system paradoxically lowers the rate of profit

Capitalists demand increasing productivity in search of the object of their desire—evergrowing profit—and they end losing up what they sought Similarly, crises develop withincapitalism not, as one would expect, from a lack of production, but from a surplus Thecapitalist crisis is a crisis of too much production or of too many objects When theproduction increases and the capitalist economy booms, the economy eventually reaches apoint at which consumers no longer have enough money to buy the products, and a crisisresults It is a crisis of too much, not a crisis of not enough, which parallels the crisis thatperpetually haunts desire Like capitalism in crisis, desire has an infinite quantity of objects,but none provide the satisfaction that it seeks In the arenas of both consumption andproduction, capitalism remains within the logic and limitations of the fantasy that thesatisfying object exists It adheres to this fantasy and attempts to distance itself at all timesfrom the trauma of subjectivity’s inherent failure

The engine for capitalist production is the accumulation of capital The capitalist invests

in order to accumulate more, and more capital functions as a constantly reappearing object

of desire When I have successfully accumulated a quantity of capital that I anticipate will

be satisfying, I experience the dissatisfaction that always accompanies obtaining the object

of desire and seek out an additional quantity that I associate with the satisfaction that Ihave just missed For the capitalist producer, this process of desire and fulfillment has notemporal or spatial barrier It can go on infinitely, and the series of disappointments involvedhas the effect of increasing the subject’s investment in the capitalist system Today’s failureenergizes the promise of tomorrow

This holds not just for the capitalist as a subject but also for capital itself It reproducesitself and augments itself as capital through the attempt to transcend its own quantity In the

Grundrisse, Marx provides a precise description of this process that captures the psychic

resonance of capitalist production He says, “as representative of the general form ofwealth—money—capital is the endless and limitless drive to go beyond its limiting barrier

Every boundary [Grenze] is and has to be a barrier [Schranke] for it Else it would cease to

be capital—money as self-reproductive.”21 The transformation of a Grenze into a Schranke,

a boundary into a barrier, is a necessary condition for the self-reproduction of capitalism Ifcapital acted as if the boundary were a genuine boundary and not a barrier to transcend, itwould not be capital—and we would be within a different system, one based on thestructure of subjectivity rather than its obfuscation.22

The situation is almost exactly the same for the capitalist consumer Instead of seekingthe accumulation of capital, the consumer searches for the commodity that will provide theultimate satisfaction associated with the lost object Each new commodity arrives on themarket bearing the promise of this satisfaction I purchase the newest phone, video game,dress, or car with the hope that this commodity will offer the satisfaction that the last onefailed to provide, and each time I will be necessarily disappointed I may feel a fewmoments of pleasure when I acquire the new commodity, but soon its distance from theimpossible lost object will become apparent I will sink back into the desire for anothercommodity that hasn’t yet failed to deliver

One can witness the dynamic of the appearance and almost instantaneousdisappearance of the lost object manifest itself clearly in the case of children incontemporary capitalism The child will beg for an object as if this object embodied allpossible enjoyment, but even seconds after obtaining the object, the child will cast it aside

as completely devoid of the satisfaction that it promised only a very short time earlier It isdifficult to believe that anyone witnessing this commonplace experience would resist thepsychoanalytic explanation of the lost object and its role in the subject’s desire Just like thecapitalist producer, the consumer’s repeated failures do not dampen the investment in theprocess of consumption but rather enhance it This is because, while operating whollyaccording to logic of success, capitalism manages to satisfy the subject’s unconscious drive

to fail

Though capitalist subjects experience continuing dissatisfaction when they attain eachnew and disappointing object, they find satisfaction through the repetition triggered by theperpetual search for the next commodity This dynamic is crucial to capitalism’s staying

power If it just offered dissatisfaction with the promise of future satisfaction, subjectswould not tolerate the capitalist system for as long as they have But capitalism doesprovide authentic satisfaction—the satisfaction of loss—in the guise of dissatisfaction Whatappears as a dissatisfying movement forward from commodity to commodity is actually asatisfying repetition of the loss of the object The fantasy of acquisition offers the promise

of escaping from the trauma of subjectivity while leaving the subject wholly ensconced within

it By offering satisfaction in the form of dissatisfaction, capitalism gives us respite from thetrauma of subjectivity without obviating the satisfaction it delivers This is the genius of thesystem

In order to see how dissatisfaction and satisfaction interrelate in the functioning ofcapitalism, one must refuse the temptation to dissociate them from each other It is as ifeach concept represents a different way of looking at the same structure but doesn’t itselfindicate a distinct structure Constant dissatisfaction and hope for the future are just a form

of appearance that the subject’s satisfaction adopts, a form of appearance that renders itamenable to consciousness and to the capitalist system But this appearance itself doesn’tdetract from the subject’s self-satisfaction, a satisfaction that persists under capitalism’sregime of success The subject under capitalism is satisfied but cannot avow thissatisfaction while remaining invested in the capitalist system

Capitalism’s adherence to the fantasy of success at the expense of the necessity offailure is essential to its functioning Subjects who do not accept this fantasy are notcontinually seeking new objects of desire and thus are not good consumers or producers,and they inevitably put a wrench in the functioning of the capitalist system They contentthemselves with outmoded objects and recognize the satisfaction embodied in the object’sfailure to realize their desire Such subjects don’t simply settle for less than satisfyingobjects (as if they were proponents of the reality principle) but instead see their satisfaction

in the object’s inadequacy For this type of subject, the fact that the car has a dent in thefender and hesitates going up hills becomes the source of the satisfaction that it provides

This is a step that the great heroes of American literature—Captain Ahab, Huck Finn,

Lily Bart, Jay Gatsby, and the narrator of Invisible Man—never make At the end of each

novel in which these characters appear, they continue to seek an adequate object, even ifthey take up an oppositional position relative to the social order Huck Finn decides to leavecivilization, but he does so in order to find an object that would realize his desire In thissense, he remains, along with the others, entrapped within the logic of success thatcapitalism proffers Even though these heroes expose the vacuity of the American fantasy,they do so from the perspective of the existence of a truly satisfying object and, in thissense, they remain exemplars of capitalist subjectivity

When one recognizes that no object will provide the ultimate satisfaction, one can divestpsychically from the capitalist system One can reject a role in the incessant reproduction ofthe capitalist system, a rejection that coincides with a rejection of the logic of success aswell This rejection alone does not topple capitalism, but it is the necessary condition forrevolutionary politics Capitalism induces subjects into investing themselves in the system’sreproduction by capturing them at the level of their desires, but this is precisely the level atwhich the subject can abandon the capitalist system The logic of subjectivity is itself

ultimately incompatible with capitalism and therefore provides the path to an alternative thatenvisions production and consumption in other ways.

The subject’s self-satisfaction derails capitalism’s need for perpetually dissatisfiedsubjects The difficulty within the capitalist system lies with recognizing this self-satisfaction,since capitalist ideology constantly works to create a sense of dissatisfaction in subjects.The creation of dissatisfaction is almost the sole aim of the advertisement, which showsimages of apparently delicious pizza in order to convince viewers that whatever theyalready have will not provide the same enjoyment as the pizza or which plays the sounds of

a new song that promises to outstrip the enjoyment delivered by any older ones The

self-satisfied consumer is no longer a consumer, which is why the very term customer

satisfaction is inherently misleading Companies may want some degree of customer

satisfaction, but their goal is ultimately enough dissatisfaction to keep customers returningfor a new commodity Such dissatisfaction is what the subject that recognizes itsconstitutive loss avoids The production strategy of planned obsolescence, which is integral

to the constant expansion of capitalism, depends on the existence of subjects who believe

in the promise of the new commodity and thereby miss the satisfaction that exists in thefailed commodity—the satisfaction in failure that capitalist subjects experience and yet don’trecognize

THE END OF THE OTHER

Psychoanalysis emerges in response to this unavowed satisfaction and attempts to assistsubjects in coming to terms with it It attempts, in other words, to move subjects fromillusory dissatisfaction to a new way of relating to their satisfaction The path ofpsychoanalysis, at least after Freud’s theoretical revolution in 1920, is not one leading fromdissatisfaction to satisfaction but from one form of satisfaction to another The space inwhich psychoanalysis can act here is very limited The cure could only involve allowing thesubject to recognize where its satisfaction lies and how it already has what it’s looking for.This type of intervention begins with the subject’s relation to the Other

The capitalist subject mistakes satisfaction for dissatisfaction because it fails torecognize the status of the Other Social existence involves the encounter with others, butbeyond these others the subject sees the Other, a figure of social authority that representsthe social order as a whole and makes demands on the subject.23 The subject’s subjection

to this authority stems from the belief in it, but the Other does not exist There are figures ofsocial authority (parents, athletes, film stars, presidents), but there is no social authority assuch No one, in other words, knows the secret of social order or how one might fullybelong to it.24 The in-crowd of whatever sort is populated by people who are themselvesactually outsiders acting as if they belong Through an illusion of perspective, the subjectdoesn’t see this It fantasizes an Other into existence in order to believe that someoneknows the impossible secret of true belonging But this illusion is necessary The image ofthe desiring Other kick-starts the desire of the subject The subject emerges out of thedefiles of the desire of the Other that doesn’t exist

The problem of the desire of the Other exists wherever there is signification Butcapitalism creates a singular focus on the desire of the Other in a way that no priorsocioeconomic system has This focus on the desire of the Other creates subjects whodedicate themselves to the interpretation of this desire They spend their time readingfashion magazines, learning about the lives of Hollywood stars, or following the movements

of famous sports figures All of these activities that capitalist society fosters have as thegoal interpreting the desire of the Other so that the subjects engaged in this interpretativeprocess can solve the problem of desire Capitalism brings possible solutions to the desire

of the Other to the fore, and it insists that this desire actually exists

But capitalism does not invent the desire of the Other The system of significationdepends on the gaps in its structure where desire can emerge, but subjects do notimmediately desire on their own Rather than forming organically out of physiological need,desire requires a stimulus, and this is what the desire of the Other provides In this sense,the desire of the Other is a necessary illusion The subject confronts the Other in the form

of either a group of others or a single individual imbued with authority From the Other, thesubject seeks guidance as to what it should desire and—which is to say the same thing—as

to how it might capture the desire of the Other

There are no desires belonging to the subject itself that it gives up for the sake of theOther The subject does not simply settle for the desire of the Other or betray its owndesire by adopting that of the Other To the contrary, the subject’s own desire derives fromits interpretation of the desire of the Other I begin unconsciously to desire something when

I interpret the Other as initially desiring it This desire becomes my desire—and I believe it

is fully genuine—but its origin lies outside my subjectivity This initial alienation of the subject

in the Other is not, however, the final barrier The true problem is the existential status ofthe Other Though the subject believes in the Other, the Other qua figure of authority thathas a desire does not exist

To say that the Other does not exist is not to accept the solipsistic verdict that thesubject can know only itself Instead, it means that there is no authority to guide the subject

in its search for what it should desire While the subject interprets the desire of the Other inorder to discover its own desire, the Other itself simultaneously interprets some otherdesire in order to discover its desire Desire arises out of this chain of interpretation thathas no endpoint There is no desire that is not the interpretation of a missing desire If thedesire were present and obvious, it would no longer be a desire We would question whatreal desire was hidden beneath the manifest one and thus engage again in the act ofinterpretation

The absence of a starting point for desire manifests itself in popular fashions No oneperson initially decided, for instance, that not taking the tags off new clothes was a coolthing to do This strange fashion trend began not with one subject’s desire but with theinterpretation of the desire of the Other.25 That is to say, subjects adopt this style becausethey believe that it’s already cool The misinterpretation of the Other’s desire retroactivelycreates an Other who originated the fashion The subject who believes in an originator offashion relies on a dangerous and paranoid misinterpretation A correct interpretation wouldreveal that there is nothing existing to be interpreted

FANTASIZING THE END

Since the desire of the Other can provide no concrete guidance for the subject in its searchfor what to desire, it must have recourse to fantasy Here capitalism again comes to thesubject’s aid by providing innumerable fantasies that direct the subject’s desire both towardthe proper work and toward the proper commodity Fantasy provides the subject guidanceabout what the Other desires and thus constitutes this desire as knowable Without thisguidance, there would be no way of approaching this desire or beginning to make sense of

it In some sense, the subject fantasizes this desire into existence: the fantasy givescoherence to the Other’s desire by creating an imaginary scenario surrounding the Other

Lacan offers an enigmatic definition of fantasy in his seminar on The Logic of Fantasy He

says, “in the final accounting the fantasy is a sentence with a grammatical structure.”26 That

is to say, fantasy gives the desire of the Other a concrete form that it otherwise lacks Even

if fantasy imagines a traumatic desire—the Other wants to destroy us—it nonethelessprovides the security of an existing Other that can guide our desire

We can see this dynamic in the way that the fantasy of the terrorist functions forAmerican society Of course, there are actual terrorists who want to kill Americans, but thepower of the terrorist fantasy far outstrips the danger that these actual terrorists represent.Very few people fear driving in a car, and yet one is exponentially more likely to die in thismode of transportation than from a terrorist blowing up an airplane The latter eventoccasions dread because it touches on our fantasy space, whereas death in a car—except

as envisioned in David Cronenberg’s Crash (1996), an exploration of auto-eroticism—

remains largely fantasy-free The fantasy of horrible death from terrorism is hardly acomforting one, but it does give American society a concrete image of the Islamic believer.The fantasy brings this believer into existence and renders his—almost always his in thefantasy—desire knowable The threat to American society constitutes American identity asbesieged and, at the same time, envied, which is why, after the terrorist attacks ofSeptember 11, 2001, George W Bush proclaimed that American freedom itself was anoverriding motive for the attacks Even the most traumatic fantasy offers assurance

The subject’s subjection to the social order becomes complete through the acceptance

of the fundamental fantasy underlying that order Confronted with the impossibility of theOther’s desire, the subject faces its failure to belong The respite of fantasy is an image ofbelonging to an order that seems to bar the subject’s entry It is the password to a secretsociety Even the subject who doesn’t belong to Skull and Bones at Yale effectively doesbelong to a larger version insofar as it accepts the society’s fundamental fantasy.27 But thesubject can never exist wholly in the world that fantasy constructs The status of the fantasymust always be tenuous in order for it to work as a source of social cohesion Capitalismutilizes fantasy to a remarkable extent, but it also sustains fantasy’s tenuousness

Under capitalism, the desire of the Other both remains fundamentally unknowable andappears accessible through fantasy The subject never knows exactly what commodity toproduce or consume, and yet the commodity itself provides a fantasmatic answer to thismystery The commodity presents itself at once as the unknown desire of the Other and thefantasized solution to that desire The fact that it maintains these two contradictory

positions gives capitalism great power in the psyche It rouses us by showing the Other asmysterious while comforting us with the idea that we might solve this purported enigma ofthe Other If capitalism just offered the mystery of the Other or the fantasized solution ofthis mystery, it would fail to gain a psychic foothold The two positions must constantly playoff each other, or else the subject’s disappointment—either in the irresolvable mystery orthe ultimately inadequate solution—will break the commitment to the capitalist system Thefantasy constantly presents the possibility of full belonging to the subject, but, at the sametime, the fantasy must remain an unrealized fantasy The capitalist subject can neverexperience a sense of belonging while remaining a capitalist subject.

Of all previously existing economic systems, capitalism offers the most evidentfantasmatic solution to the problem of the desire of the Other That is to say, it offers theclearest path to social acceptance and belonging When we imagine societies with clearmarriage rules or entrance rituals, this claim seems clearly wrong Their solution to theproblem of desire appears superior to that of capitalism.28 Traditional societies don’t havethe desire of the Other hidden in fashion trends or the production of electronics, but clearlyspell it out in social regulations But the psychic power of the commodity outstrips the mostrigid societal structure in its capacity for illuminating the subject’s path The commodity formhas the effect of clarifying the desire of the Other by making it manifest in a concreteobject If I doubt what the Other wants me to do, I need only follow the money It willprovide a clear fantasized solution to the desire of the Other Traditional society, incontrast, offers regulations whose explicit status prevents a complete psychic investment.Capitalism forces the subject to interpret its way into the social order and in this wayattaches itself firmly to the subject’s desire At the same time, it guides this interpretationthrough the commodity form and gives the subject a sense of security in the path of itsdesire

When I feel as if I must have a new product, at that moment I fully immerse myself inthe fantasy of what the Other desires Often new products fail—many times more productsenter the market each year than find a niche—because they do not manage to locatethemselves within consumers’ fantasy space The inventors of failed commodities such asPepsi Clear did not adequately carve out an appealing fantasmatic position The success ofany product is inextricable from its capacity to lodge itself within this space and to appear

as if it completely solves the question of the Other’s desire Even products that endure, likeCoke or Apple electronics, must constantly renew themselves in order to remain within theprevailing fantasy Once they become old, once they are associated with an object that theconsumer has already acquired and has discovered to be lacking, they will lose theirfantasmatic power This is why even successful brands have to continue to develop newselling points and to advertise this newness Apple must produce a new version of theiPhone or the iPad or else consumers will abandon Apple entirely The company will finditself in the situation of Zenith, a former leader in technological appliances and now anonentity We know that the old object does not respond to the desire of the Other, but thenew object allows us to keep this fantasy alive

The value of money depends on the fantasy of the Other that subtends it I acceptmoney from someone in exchange for a commodity because I have faith that the Other